Building a hit, one block at a time: the creation of Minecraft

Ars speaks with the developer behind the surprise indie hit Minecraft about …

Like a zombie shambling into the light, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Then, before you knew it, it was the game everyone was talking about. "Have you played Minecraft?" people would ask. And then I did, and I understood. Beneath its blocky visuals lies an astoundingly deep experience. You explore, collect, and build, and then when night falls, you hope you don't die. It's the type of game that really needs to be experienced before you can fully understand it. Ars spoke with developer Markus "Notch" Persson about where the game actually came from and what we can expect next.

Like many independent developers, Persson started his career working as a full-time developer, in this case working on Flash games for over four years. But during that time he also worked on a number of projects on the side, including the MMO Wurm Online, which was created alongside Rolf Jansson and released back in 2006. "As the company I was working on grew larger, my working on games during my free time became a bigger problem, so I decided to leave that job and see if I couldn't make a game on my own," he told Ars. "So I started working on Minecraft in June 2009."

The game that would eventually become Minecraft actually stemmed from a combination of two rather seemingly disparate influences.

"The original idea was to make a game similar to Dwarf Fortress in tone, but with a Rollercoaster Tycoon type interface," Persson explained. "As I was playing around with a first person mode I stumbled upon a game called Infiniminer that used low-res textures in a 3D environment, and I realized that that was a perfect fit for both my artistic skills and the type of game I wanted to make.

"Right from the start, the vision for Minecraft was very similar to where Minecraft alpha is now, but I focused on just getting the engine written and making sure that the controls felt smooth. People really liked the early versions of the game that didn't have any gameplay at all, so I decided to keep that around, calling it "creative mode.'"

Minecraft fan trailer

That creative mode is essentially a virtual sandbox, allowing players to explore and build however they want. But the recent alpha version of the game features a more structured experience, and one that has captured the imagination of the gaming community. The survival mode forces players to utilize their time wisely: building up a defense during the day so that they can withstand an onslaught of monsters during the night. It's every zombie fan's dream come true and even inspired a series of Penny Arcade strips.

"The response has been overwhelming!" Persson told Ars. "I kind of started to suspect that the game had some potential early this year, but lately it's really gotten quite insane. Seeing the game get mentioned on Penny Arcade was a huge honor, but it actually felt like a bigger thing when VGCats featured it."

The success of the game is especially impressive when you consider that Minecraft isn't even in its final version yet. Persson and his team still have a lot of plans to expand the world of Minecraft, as well as improving the business side of things for the budding development studio Mojang Specifications.

"I'm working on hiring some people to help with development and business, getting an office, and all that," he told Ars. "Then my focus is to finish up survival mode multiplayer, with working enemies and health and better cheat prevention tools for server admins. Once that is done, the game will be in beta, and there will be lots of polishing and tweaks to get the game ready for the final version. After the final version, we will keep working on the game.

"There are a lot of things that could be added to this game, and we'd like to try to add as many of those as we can."

69 Reader Comments

The multiplayer is all sorts of buildery-fun [if you liked Legos, you'll probably like this]. As it's still an alpha, though, it's fairly riddled with bugs [most notably being indestructible in multiplayer], but they're being continually worked on.

So let's get the Ars gang together, and hammer their servers into an even larger pile of debris [for those that don't know, demand has been high enough that his servers/hosts keep crashing/going down]! It should be fun, anyways. Just watch out for Mahraja on the servers.

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The success of the game is especially impressive when you consider that Minecraft isn't even in its final version yet.

There are thousands of Minecraft videos out there, but I doubt there's anything quite as addictive as X's Adventures in Minecraft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bh4EexJO4I If you watch it, I hope you don't see the appeal, because otherwise you might end up wasting hours on it.

There are thousands of Minecraft videos out there, but I doubt there's anything quite as addictive as X's Adventures in Minecraft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bh4EexJO4I If you watch it, I hope you don't see the appeal, because otherwise you might end up wasting hours on it.

X is a pretty good caster and when combine with this game it's hard not just keep watching the videos. Be warned though, its about 10 hours of total Mincraft footage. After that you will be dragged into possibly dozens of hours of actual play time.

I recommend the wiki for those he need some documentation. If you want to see cool Minecraft stuff I find Minecraft subreddit is a better sources then forums.

And for the newbs: * Never dig above your head or below your feet * Exploring caves is the fastest way to get resources. * Explore caves with a plan, or you will get lost! (if lost dig to the surface) * That cage type thing with fire inside, on top of the green rock, is a monster spawner, put torches around it to turn it off * Layers 11-17 contain the most diamonds and other resources (1st layer being the bottom)

Damn it, stop interviewing Notch so he doesn't have to slow development until December

Delaying completion of the multiplayer code is a minus. But knocking out the login servers (as PA's posts did) and forcing Notch to make the game free to play for a few more days will ultimately mean he sells more copies, which he has definitely earned with this game!

I'd love to play this game. It looks awesome, but I don't have the time to play and I know I'd just get sucked into it and hopelessly waste countless hours of my life it.

That is exactly what happened to my friend at school. I showed him the game and the videos about X's adventures. And he really didn't want to buy it cause he know his grades would go down. But then we had a 4 day weekend and he caved in and bought the game

The constant problems with minecraft.net over the last fortnight have really put a damper on Notch's development speed. As well as going on vacation, hiring staff, and renting an office, he has had to learn how to use cloud computing, and fixup his homebrew registation process to cope wtih the demand of tens of thousands of purchases per day.

A friend at work berated me for telling him about minecraft

"I tried it at midnight on Sunday, and 11 hours later I had to froce myself to go to bed, the rest of the long weekend was similarly trashed"

This from the guy who bougt Civ 5 last week, only to find that it wouldn't "unlock" for Australian users until Friday ... he played Civ for two days, then fou d minecraft and has just been. spending all of his time on that,instead of his $100 copy of Civ!

when you have the money for the shiney toys you always wanted and the games you always wanted and the books and movies and music you always wanted...all of the sudden a full 1/3 of your day or more is eaten up by work so you don't have time to enjoy it. It's wrong, sick and disturbing isn't it?

I've only dabbled a tiny bit at the edges of Minecraft, but that video is unbelievable. I mean, just the time involved - how could you ever build that thing?

You take a random 3D-model of something. Scale it to fit the 1m cubic world in minecraft. Save it as .iges or something. Read that into a tool that converts 3d-solids into point clouds and then convert the point cloud into a level in minecraft.

Bear in mind that I haven't even tried minecraft yet and don't know anything about it but that's how I'd do this thing.

This is an incredible game and the fan made trailer shows this well. The graphics may be simple and in concept so is the gameplay, but you will find yourself making cooler and more elaborate mines, houses and sculptures. As has been posted above, if you love Lego's; this is your addiction.

You mine, harvest, craft, explore and try your absolute hardest to not die, all the while trying to build structures around you. This game does a very good job at syncing sound events to relevant game information (such as a spider coming up behind you). All enemies are potentially deadly and you are never truly safe in single player. The crafting system is interesting and works fairly well, though it could use some more recipes to allow the player to work with.

Multi-player has not been fully implemented *yet* so everyone is invincible and the mobs don't spawn at night. However you can still have great amounts of fun just cooperatively or competitively building.

Even if you are not a big fan of legos you might like this. Basically, Minecraft presents you with a world that you can shape however you want.

You can definitely go lego crazy, but exploration is also really great. Just walking across the (procedurally generated infinite) surface provides hours of fun. I still get surprised by some amazing waterfall or gigantic mountain after maybe 40 hours of play.

And then there are the caves. Sometimes they are a just little dugouts, but then you swing your pick and there is just darkness on the other side. Step through and turn the corner and you find you are in an absolutely gigantic cavern with a waterfall on one side and a lava fall on the other! Then there are the swiss cheese caverns that are almost impossible not to get lost in. Escaping those without resorting to digging upwards is quite the challenge!

The exploring and building are combined perfectly here. If you have a trusty compass you can always make your way back home. After many hours under the surface digging up treasure you will eventually get claustrophobic. Or maybe you run out of food and wood. Either way, when you start that journey back, it is really amazing how joyous it is to finally see your torch laden castle glowing in the distance! Home!!

Honestly, I think Minecraft is the most important game since at least Portal.

Either way, when you start that journey back, it is really amazing how joyous it is to finally see your torch laden castle glowing in the distance! Home!!

Thats one of the things I *love* about this game - just last night I found a terrifyingly enormous cave system, and just ran around the tunnels, caverns, treacherous sinkholes and towering shafts that made it up nervously sticking up torches to light it. I was wondering how the hell such a twisty cave system could exist without intersecting with itself, and every time I spied dim light in the darkness, i was like 'please, let that be torches!', but it was always...lava. When I finally turned a darkened corner, countless miles and 400 torches later and on my last heart, to the glow of a torch shining through a crack in the ground below me it was such a joy!

What was even better was seeing another pool of light a little further on, walking over to it and looking up a ~300ft shaft to see daylight at the top, then carefuly climbing the sheer cliff walls to a little forest barely a hundred yards from my base